The global economy is probably already dependent on some Claude code instance updating an Excel spreadsheet on someone’s laptop with a note ”don’t close the lid!” attached to it
When I was a teenager I used to work at an airport and they had critical infrastructure running on things like Basic and Assembly, to transfer data between the computers and modern systems you have to use floppy disks because the computers that they ran on didn’t have drivers to support USB and we couldn’t upgrade the computers because the software wouldn’t work on any other hardware.
So the AI laptop will be at home amongst all the ancient but supercritical junk that seems to be necessary to run our world.
That’s dumb. The “work” in maintaining this excel file was the prompting and overall agent logic. In reality you’d be using something like openrouter and the instant claude “dies” for whatever reason you swap to whatever the freshest AI is. This never becomes ancient, it keeps up with the times.
At a previous job, I had to build laptops that would multi-boot DOS, Win95, Win98, and XP, all on one laptop. Our field-tech’s software had to have those specific versions of windows for the machines that they serviced, because of how the software interacted with USB and embeded floppy drives.
If you want to scare yourself:
spoiler
They serviced Medical devices: X-rays, MRIs, CT-Scanners, etc.
Honestly, I’d prefer those medical device run on older software than even Win10 lol
As a millennial the only positive of LLMs is that younger generations won’t threaten my career
Younger generations are, by and large, as technologically illiterate as boomers are. It doesnt apply to all of them, but the majority of them grew up with nothing but easy UIs. They may not chicken-pick to type, but they still cant troubleshoot anything and tend to know nothing outside of interacting with a typical interface. They definitely grew up with nothing like Windows 95 or 98 (or even XP) where you had to actually understand how a computer works to some extent to use the thing (or fix it)
Millennials, particularly the younger millennials especially, grew up right in the sweet spot to be at a tech advantage. At least as far as the average person goes. Obviously anyone passionate about tech will be far ahead of the average person, regardless of age
